Business scenario

Most companies nowadays have multiple sites to manage. They can be from completely different purposes sites, such as an intranet, corporate website, etc to multiple "almost similar" sites to provide services to their franchises, regional offices, etc. And in all those cases, our customers need to manage articles, images, documents, etc that are going to be reused in many places.

The way Liferay tackles this is through site hierarchy or by means of storing the shared content in the global site. Although these mechanisms solve most of the situations described above, the system is not flexible enough. For example, the global site can become a grab bag, mixing unrelated items just for the sake of sharing them among sites. And site hierarchy makes sense when there's a strict relationship between the sites (headquarters and regional sites, for example), but not quite the same when you want for example to reuse content created by the legal team in other department sites.

Solution

Provide a flexible mechanism to create multiple repositories that can store from very specific types of content, such as an image repository, to a more generic one, like a repository for all the marketing material, so later it can be reused in other repositories or sites.

Benefits of the solution

With this new feature our customers will improve on two aspects:

• Content organization: As they'll be able to create multiple repositories, not attached to any specific site, and connect them to any other repo or site they want, they will be able to organize the content in a better way. They'll be able to create N "global" repositories.

• Content reuse: By being able to connect any repository with any other or site, reusing content is just a matter of creating that connection and start using the content stored. There's no need to duplicate content.